Connecticut's Little Known Brush With Eugenics

ALIX BOYLE

Would Connecticut ever survey its citizens to determine who was desirable and undesirable?

It cannot be called a Connecticut secret, but it is at least a little-known fact that the state — specifically Gov. Wilbur L. Cross, for whom the parkway and at least one high school were named — commissioned a 1938 survey to catalog its residents' traits for research in eugenics and future nationwide eugenic applications.

The survey's intent was to identify so-called undesirable people so that they might be sterilized, preventing them from passing on undesirable traits, said Heidi Rydene, now a biology professor specializing in evolutionary biology and genetics at Gateway Community College.

"Basically, they divided people into morons and nonmorons," said Rydene, who researched the topic at length and wrote a masters thesis on it in 1988 called "The Connecticut Human Resources Surveys of 1938 and 1948 Examined as Local Examples of the Eugenics Movement in the United States."

"They could have been talking about my grandparents, Italian immigrants, who read newspapers but didn't go to the opera or other highbrow entertainment," Rydene said of the way the survey was conducted. (It was followed in 1948 by "The Social Adjustment of Morons in a Connecticut City," but more on that later.)

To conduct the 1938 survey,the governor signed into law an act establishing a commission of six people to "survey the human resources — good and bad — of Connecticut for possible nationwide eugenic applications," Rydene wrote in her thesis.The results of the survey were set up as an exhibit for the public; it does not appear those results were acted upon.

The six-member commission recommended establishing a state Department of Mental Health to "research methods ... to allay mental disease and prevent its increase." The scheme never came to pass, but Connecticut did have a sterilization law on the books dating to 1909 and 557 people, thought to be insane or mentally handicapped, were sterilized from 1909 to 1963 by the state.

"The Survey of the Human Resources of Connecticut," on file at the Yale Library, was written by Harry Hamilton Laughlin, a leading American eugenicist in the first half of the 1900s, and one of the founders of the American Eugenics Society based in New Haven.

Today, a New Haven resident is questioning whether the name of Gov. Wilbur Cross should be removed from the New Haven high school and the parkway, given his apparent support of eugenics.

Linwood Branham Sr., an organizer of the Society of Former Slaves and Freemen and a history buff, said he was researching eugenics and came upon the story of Cross and the survey. As a 1966 graduate of Wilbur Cross High School and a member of its basketball and track teams, he was particularly distressed. All the teams are called the Governors.

"When I read about Cross, my jaw dropped. The people of Connecticut need to know this story. Why did they do it? We need to talk about this openly. As a black man, I say we are still suffering," Branham said.

Rydene stressed that the 1938 survey was mainly about immigrants, adding, "There was not one black person mentioned."

Branham would not go so far as to say that Cross high school and parkway should be renamed for a less controversial figure, but said the matter should be discussed publicly.

In 1938, survey field workers were dispatched to collect data based on questions, including whether an individual read newspapers, attended cultural events like opera and studied past the eighth grade.

Connecticut was considered the perfect size state to study because it was both urban and rural, smallish and its families were both fairly recent immigrants and established families.

People in the state were categorized into two categories: socially adequate or socially inadequate, based on information gathered by the field workers. The list of social inadequates, according to publications of the American Eugenics Society, included the feebleminded, the deaf, the insane, those with speech defects, the diseased, crippled or deformed. Further, the blind, dependent, poor, alcoholic or criminals were persona non grata.

Once the data were collected, the commission's charge was to divide the population into worthy and lacking, then, to determine the cost of dealing with the socially inadequate, to locate the source of the "problem," and to learn how to handle the burden of the inadequate. And then, the commission needed to "determine the racial descent of the present population of the state with particular reference to social value — good and bad," Rydene's thesis said. Next, it should "study the mate selection facts and reproductive rates within the various sections of the population, and thus determine the present trends in the population of Connecticut by racial make up and family stock quality," the thesis said.

"Connecticut was the first state to do a study like this," Rydene said.

The survey included all 169 towns, 46 farms, 10 jails, eight temporary homes for children and 18 state "custodial establishments." The findings of the survey could then lead to "the better conservation of the more sound and competent racial strains and family stocks of the state, and for the prevention, or at least the substantial reduction, of certain hereditary handicaps of a socially inadequating nature within the future population of the state," the thesis says.

The survey was commissioned not long after the creation of the American Eugenics Society in the early 1900s. "Although the eugenics movement had been gaining strength in the United States for over a decade, there was at the time no formal organization through which to pursue its broader political and educational agenda. As a result, a group of prominent eugenicists founded the Eugenics Committee of the U.S.A., which became the Eugenics Society of America, and finally, in 1925, the American Eugenics Society (AES)," according to the American Philsophical Society in Philadelphia, which is the repository of many society records.

"From its base in New Haven .... the AES soon attracted the support of nearly every major American eugenicist and for the first decade of its existence, at least, was very successful at promoting eugenic ideas to the American public. More an advocacy group than a scientific organization, the AES promoted its ideals of racial betterment, eugenic health, and genetic education through public lectures, conferences, publications, and exhibits at county and state fairs," the APS reports on a virtual exhibit about eugenics on its web site.

During this time, the U.S. Supreme Court also found – in the case Buck v. Bell – that a state's compulsory sterilization law did not violate the due process protections of the 14th Amendment and that decision lent credence to the cause of eugenics and its proponents.

With the advent of World War II and eugenics close association with Nazism, as well as the eventual repeal of sterilization laws around the country following the 1942 U.S. Supreme Court case Skinner v. Oklahoma, the movement lost many of its supporters internationally and nationally.

In Connecticut, Cross was not re-elected and a follow-up study was published in 1948 by Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy under the aegis of Gov. James C. Shannon that aimed to study the "social adjustment" of people previously classified as morons. That study was called "The Social Adjustment of Morons in a Connecticut City."

"That study was an apology for the first study," Rydene said.

In her thesis, Rydene quotes Kennedy as writing that individuals are often "unjustly designated as 'feebleminded' in the literal sense." The 1948 study looked at IQ scores and education records and whether a person was held back in school. In the second study, Kennedy concluded that morons, "In their humble way ... are worthy citizens who bear their share of social burden and do not threaten the welfare of society."

Her conclusion?

"This group [those behind the 1938 survey] was driven by fear," Rydene said. "They didn't understand the science of genetics and they thought they could breed out undesirable characteristics like alcoholism."

So, should the Wilbur Cross High School and parkway be renamed?

"Definitely not," Rydene said. "There's no doubt in my mind. Cross was simply acting under the existing norms of science at the time. It's a historic snapshot of what the world was thinking just then."